My step-grandpa was a paleontologist. After a long and meaningful life, he recently passed away. When I went up to his coffin in the funeral home, apart from the carefully prepared body that didn’t bear much resemblance to the man I had known, I noticed something shiny in his hands. He was clutching a rock hammer, the kind I’d seen him use numerous times to pry apart and split shale rock. I couldn’t help but smile at the understated poetry in seeing him holding that tool.

When I die, I’ve often thought that I’d love to be involved in a grand display of some kind. We spend so much money on funerals, so why do they have to be so boring and uninventive? With that much money, I’d hope for something unique and spectacular.Perhaps my loved ones could send me out to sea on a log raft, then have an archer shoot a flaming arrow into the floating funeral pyre to set it ablaze. Viking style. That seems like a great way to go.

Or, since I’m dead and don’t care about money at that point anyway, why not take a practical and inexpensive route? Buying land in a cemetery and paying for an expensive, fancy coffin seems like such a waste. Instead, cremation sounds good to me. I like the idea of having my ashes scattered across some landscape that held special meaning to me.

The best option of all, though, would be doing something useful with my cadaver. After some thought, I’ve decided what I really want is to donate my body to science. I have no qualms whatsoever about aspiring medical students sawing my body apart to learn. If I can be of use in some way, what better punctuation to place at the end of my life’s book than a token of my appreciation of science and medicine.

My wife’s not really on board with any of these options except the boring, traditional burial in a coffin, so here I post my explicit and unequivocal wishes to have my body donated to science. If I must have a tombstone, I suppose that’s acceptable. But so help me, if I get stuck in some pine box, I’ll be haunting whoever disregards my intentions.